The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
The proliferation of network devices has become ubiquitous. There are network devices that serve as the backbone of a communications network, such as switches and routers. Also, network devices facilitate access to certain web-based applications, such as load balancers to facilitate access to a service over multiple servers. Furthermore, there are network devices for optimization of data transfer speed or quality across the network, encryption/decryption, etc., and network devices that make up an overlay network. Other types of network devices may also be present in a communication network.
As the number of these devices multiplies rapidly, dynamic monitoring of these devices becomes cumbersome for a human network administrator. Traditionally when a device malfunctioned, the network administrator received an alarm notifying him that a device is not operating properly. However, when there are hundreds or thousands of network devices deployed, having many simultaneous alarms triggered at the same time can be overwhelming and difficult to individually evaluate to discern the problematic activity or cause of the triggered alarms. Furthermore, the longer it takes to diagnose a problem, the longer it takes to fix it, which can result in real cost expenditures until a business can get their systems online again.
Further, there are many paths, both physical and virtual, that data packets can take as they travel through a communications network. The performance of the different paths may continually change based on numerous variables, such as load, physical connectivity, power loss, overheating, bad cables, low memory, software bugs, etc. Monitoring the performance of these paths can be important, especially when trying to find ways to increase network performance across the paths. Also, not all devices can measure characteristics of all of the paths, so there needs to be a way to characterize the performance of each path based on the data available.
Additionally, a provider of an overlay network cannot directly measure the health of core network routers, switches, or other devices, so measuring performance of paths over the network devices is one way to evaluate network performance.
There is a need for a way to characterize and evaluate performance of individual paths and devices within a network, so that a network administrator can quickly discern where a problem exists without sifting through reams of data points. Further, there is a need for a simple visualization platform for a network administrator to view and monitor network performance characteristics of a multitude of deployed network devices, paths, and tunnels across a communications network.